Bob McDougall: Our elderly people deserve a better deal

THIS week, Labour called for an independent older person's champion to drive up care standards, after the recent closure of the Elsie Inglis nursing home in Edinburgh.

While this offers a starting point for improving provisions for the elderly, whose numbers are growing exponentially across the country, major changes will not be seen until local authorities and service providers start working together to offer a needs-led rather than budget-driven approach to care.

Across the board, there is a drive to reduce costs while the demand for services continues to increase. Stories of fleeting visits by overworked agency staff determined by what suits the care provider, rather than the individual, are becoming all too common. These incidents, along with the recent care-home crisis, show how the quality of services being offered to the elderly is diminishing.

Yet, improvements could be made, were central and local government willing to co-ordinate housing, social work and care services funding and service delivery to provide a higher quality of choice for our elders. We need to expand the concept of traditional models of sheltered and residential care, where you take an older person out of their own home and put them in a specialised, staffed environment and instead look to the "housing with care" model, where service providers work together to offer assistance to people in their own home.

My organisation has introduced this model across several developments, where the care is not sheltered or residential, but gives residents the chance to live independently in their own tenancy, with care services provided on site.

We need to ensure our ageing population maintain a good quality of life and to stop seeing them as a liability and begin to view them for precisely what they are – an asset. For the elderly to receive the services they require, and which a civilised society has a duty to provide, there will need to be drastic changes, and these need to start now.

• Bob McDougall is chief executive of Trust Housing Association.